Thankful for this Book Review from Sundress and some Rodney Mullen clips

Speaking of thanks, Jia and I were also extremely grateful for this amazing review of Gravity & Spectacle from Shannon Wolf at the Sundress Blog:

"There is something both cheeky and somber about Baker and Orion’s united perspective. 

 Orion’s poems are as close to punk rock as we can get in 2021." 

You can read the full review at https://sundressblog.com/2021/02/08/sundress-reads-gravity-spectacle-by-shawnte-orion-and-jia-oak-baker/

Wolf mentions that a few of the poems reference legendary skateboarder Rodney Mullen, so here is some of that backstory: The central art piece in all of Jia's photographs was made by artist JJ Horner. Since JJ co-founded the skate company Pyramid Country. We wanted to make sure to pay some homage to those roots, through our photos and poems. So we made a few trips to the skatepark next to Cowtown Skateboards 

Since Rodney Mullen is brilliant on a skateboard and in conversation, I tried to cut-up some fragments of language and phrases from his interviews and biography "The Mutt: How to Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself" and shape them into new out-of-context found poems... the same way skateboarders use his techniques as building blocks for new tricks.

Here's one of my favorite interviews, so you can see that Mullen is poetic both on and off his board and also how his descriptions of the skate community can also be easily applied to the writing community.